Hayley Williams Once Secretly Quit Paramore

Haley Williams, Paramore’s frontwoman isn’t always the firecracker fans see on stage. In fact, the Tennessee native revealed she’d actually quit the band briefly in 2015 to deal with depression and exhaustion.

In a new cover story for Fader, Williams explains leading up to that point there had been days spent in bed, and a developing fixation with death. She eventually sought a therapist.

“For the first time in my life, there wasn’t a pinhole of light at the end of the tunnel,” she told the publication. “I thought, ‘I just wish everything would stop.’ It wasn’t in the sense of, ‘I’m going to take my life.’ It was just hopelessness. Like, ‘What’s the point?’ I don’t think I understood how dangerous hopelessness is. Everything hurts.”

Although it was exhaustion from the business of music that contributed to her state, it was also music that lifted her out of the chasm. Friends and song-writing partners Taylor York and Justin Meldal-Johnson, began sending her unfinished songs that helped to drag Williams out of her state of depression.

Paramore released After Laughter, their fifth full-length in May. “It’s taken me about this long to truly let go [of the songs we made]” she said of the very personal new album.